Here’s a day-brightener. The New York Sun today reports on the surprising uptick of New York Times stock–up about 10% yesterday–which in recent years has behaved like a dead dog that’s been run over by a tractor-trailer before being shoved over a cliff at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

What accounts for the Lazarus routine? In brief, free-market pressure. News that a couple of hedge funds have nominated four directors to replace some who were loyal to the Ochs-Sulzberger family that controls the newspaper has been making the rounds. Result: smiles and a rising stock price. Young(ish) Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. has been doing his damndest to transform the once-great paper into a politically correct laughing stock, destroying its financial prospects along the way (stock price in 2004: +/- $50; stock price yesterday: $16). From a business as well as from a journalistic point of view, diluting the baneful influence of Pinch is a no-brainer.

But the letter from Scott Galloway, chief investment officer of one of the hedge funds, to the Times management contained this hilarious sentence: “The New York Times is the world’s foremost evangelist for democracy, capitalism and culture.” Earth to Scott, earth to Scott: this is The New York Times you are talking about: you know, the Bush-bashing, America-hating, trash-culture-loving bastion of tattered left-liberal piety and advocate of shopworn top-down bureaucratic control of the economy. “What edition of the Times,” the Sun asked, “does Mr. Galloway read?”

There was the editorial that lamented, “The economy has been so hot in the past few years that there is a natural temptation to declare that America’s freewheeling ‘cowboy” capitalism has triumphed permanently over European or Japanese versions.” And the one that said, “the free market works best when not completely free” and warned against those who “idealized capitalism from a distance” while not being cognizant of “the dangers of underregulation.” The New York Times likes capitalism, except for in the housing, energy, computer, or health care sectors. As for democracy, the Times has mocked President Bush’s idea of expanding it to Iraq as “gauzy talk.”

It’ll be illuminating to see how the so-called world’s foremost evangelist for capitalism responds to a bid by shareholders to maximize value. . . . [S]omething tells us that by the end of this story Mr. Galloway isn’t going to be describing the paper as the world’s foremost evangelist for capitalism — or democracy, shareholder or otherwise.

No kidding.

If you happen to find yourself in Saudi Arabia driving down the highway toward Mecca, you will eventually encounter a big sign advising you that Mecca is for Muslims only. The other road is “obligatory for non Muslims.”

Penalty for taking the wrong road? Officially, there is “no set punishment for this offense,” though incarceration followed by a large fine and expulsion are not uncommon. One source of advice for travelers offers the friendly tip that non-Muslims avoid Mecca (and Medina, where similar restrictions apply) because “Severe punishment is given to the non-Muslims if they are caught inside Mecca.” The 19th-century traveler Richard Burton took the precaution of having himself circumcised before sneaking into the city in 1853 disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. Notwithstanding the lack of official sanctions, he wrote, “nothing could save a European detected by the populace, or one who after pilgrimage declared himself an unbeliever.”

Perhaps this seemed quaint and romantic in the 19th century. What I find remarkable is with what equanimity we–meaning we idolatrous Christian, Jewish, and atheistical Westerners–accept this prohibition. Imagine, if you will, that there was an analogous sign as you approached New York.

What wailing and gnashing of teeth there would be over that outrage! The lawsuits would pile up quicker than you can say “ACLU.” But why? The usual line is that, being a freedom-loving lot, we prefer let other people do what they like, even if what they like doing is curtailing the freedom of others–e.g., us, their own women, etc.–to travel where they like, when they like, with whom they like.

But hasn’t this asymmetry gone too far? I have no particular desire to go to Mecca–indeed, I would pay a tidy sum not to visit that locus of lunacy–but supposing I did wish to book the family into the Mecca Marquis for a spot of holiday fun and fanaticism? Why should that be forbidden? Because the Koran (9:28) says Christians and other low-lifes are “unclean”? Because Muslims regard the city as a sacred spot, bound up with the core beliefs of their religion, which we idolators do not share?

Well, couldn’t we with equal justice argue that New York (to say nothing of London, Paris, and dozens of other spots) are sacred to us idolatrous Westerners? Do they not, each in its distinctive way, epitomize some central aspect of our core beliefs, for example, the belief that one should be free to worship, or not worship, as one pleases? What city better sums up the untidy dynamism of modern democratic capitalism than New York? I do not say New York is beyond criticism, only that it embodies a way, indeed a philosophy, of life. Why should it welcome those whose fundamental outlook is not merely indifferent but ostentatiously hostile to everything that makes New York a lower-case mecca for enlightened secularists of all religions?

I sometimes ask my friends such questions. Most of them think I am just joshing. I’m not. I also ask them if they know, in rough numbers, how many Christian churches and Jewish temples there are in Saudi Arabia (to take one example)–just a ballpark figure, I tell them. Many are surprised when I tell them that the number is zero. Such institutions, and the symbols and documents that accompany them, are verboten. Yes, that’s right: Bibles, Crucifixes, the Star of David, and other such infidel religious paraphernalia are illegal there.

OK, then why are we so accommodating about Muslims’ building mosques, many of which are breeding grounds of Islamic extremism (more), in the West. As of 2004, there were more than 2000 mosques in the United States. I haven’t counted, but the number of mosques in Great Britain makes for an impressive, by which I mean long, list.

Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Muslim activist and impresario, sent shivers of delight through Western liberals when he called for a “moratorium” on the application of Sharia law–you know, stoning adultrous women to death, cutting off the hands of thieves, executing apostates, that sort of thing–in places like Western Europe that were not (or not yet) fully under the sway of Islam. Good old Tariq, who by the way, is a grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, neglected to mention exactly how long he thought his moratorium (”moratorium” n.: “a temporary reprieve or suspension”) should last: until next Tuesday? A year from Wednesday? But I would like to propose a different moratorium: a temporary reprieve or suspension of mosque building in the West until there are, say, 20 Christian churches and 20 temples in Saudi Arabia. That’s only a hundredth of the number of mosques there are in the U.S., but I don’t believe in making grandiose demands.

Again, when I mention this idea to friends, many just chuckle, thinking I am not in earnest. Why shouldn’t I be? “Oh, well, we aren’t a country like Saudi Arabia. We believe in freedom of religion,” etc., etc. Precisely. Because we believe in freedom of religion, we must be on guard against those activities which, unchecked, would spell the abolition of freedom. “There is,” said G.K. Chesterton, “a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” Freedom–religious, economic, social–is a marvelous thing. And that is why ideologies bent on using and abusing freedom in order to destroy freedom must be carefully scrutinized and, at times, curtailed.

Unfortunately, the West’s response, increasingly, has been a long preemptive cringe. Just last week, the BBC reported that a story based on the Three Little Pigs was turned down by the government for an award because the subject matter could “offend Muslims.” Note well: the report didn’t specify any actual Muslims complaining about the porcine fairy tale. Those denying the award already knew how an offended Muslim acted–who can forget the conflagration that followed the publication of those cartoons of Mohammad? No, instead of vigilance, supine resignation is the order of the day. Better capitulate now and get all that unpleasantness out of the way. It is a habit that breeds first apathy and then contempt, including self-contempt. The tonic of offending and being offended is part of the price we pay for living in a free, secular society. Those who pretend that their sensibilities are too delicate to withstand the affronts of ordinary daily life are not asking for religious freedom: they are aiming to abolish it. That must end, and soon.

So we have a worrisome stock sell-off yesterday, likely–so the financial pundits say–to be followed by further losses today. What does a seasoned politician and contender for the White House do? If you are Hillary Clinton, you propose that “the government,” that is, the bureaucracy she proposes to lead, meddle even more than it has done hitherto. Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds cited this news report about what Hillary had promised (or should I say “threatened”?) yesterday:

“Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said that if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.”

(The title of that piece, by the way, was “For Clinton, Government as Economic Prod,” as in “cattle prod,” presumably.)

Reynolds juxtaposed Hillary’s expression of interventionist longing with the fact that London’s stock market lost, according to some estimate, some £60 billion yesterday. “Coincidence, I’m sure,” he comments, a sterling deployment of rhetorical irony.

Lest readers go away thinking that this was a temporary aberration on Hillary’s part–that, really, she is a firm believer in free markets and the individual liberty they depend upon–let me re-post a comment I made early last month when HRC assured the press that “as president she would be happy to intervene in the management of the economy if she thought the free market was failing middle-class Americans.” I called the piece (which first appeared on December 3, 2007) “Hillary Clinton and Friedrich Hayek.”

“Those who cannot remember the past,” Santayana famously wrote, “are condemned to repeat it.” What he didn’t say, but what often seems to be the case, is that we can remember the past just fine and then go on to repeat it anyway. A variation, perhaps, of Ovid’s observation that “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor”—“I see and approve the better path, but follow the worse.”

I entertained some such melancholy thoughts this morning when I saw the news that Senator Clinton had gone to Wall Street to inform the assembled multitudes that, were she President, the world could expect plenty of government intervention in the U.S. economy. As a front-page story in The New York Sun put it, “Clinton Gives Wall Street a Warning”:

Senator Clinton gave a clear indication yesterday that as president she would be happy to intervene in the management of the economy if she thought the free market was failing middle-class Americans.

Who would doubt it? “Mrs. Clinton demanded,” the story went on, “an immediate injection of $5 billion into the economy to help those facing foreclosure on their homes. And she proposed another $2 billion to be spent to help poor families in cold-weather states afford heating fuel.”

“Mrs. Clinton demanded,” indeed. We’ll be hearing that phrase a lot in the months to come. And don’t ask where that $5 billion, that $2 billion are coming from—you know the answer: your pocket. (“What’s a paltry $5 billion in an economy of $12.5 trillion?” you ask. Remember Senator Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.”)

Mrs. Clinton had a few words of criticism for irresponsible borrowers, but she laid the the lion’s share of the blame for what she called “the subprime crisis” at the feet of those in Wall Street whom she accused (as The Sun put it) of “deliberately engineering a mortgage system that abandoned traditional notions of lending responsibility.” (The best, or at least the most entertaining explanation of the subprime crisis I’ve seen is available on YouTube here.)

Well, government intervention into the economy (and just about everything else, come to that: tobacco, transfats, you name it, they want to control it) seems to be back in season. Even President Bush is talking about a five-year freeze on raising the rates on all those adjustable-rate mortgages bankers were passing out a few years ago.

This is not, of course, a new idea. “We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.” So thought Benito Mussolini, who did what he could to restrict the freedom of the individual.

Admittedly, Mussolini was a rank amateur compared, say, to V.I. Lenin, but when it came to curtailing individual freedom by expanding the coercive power of the state, they worked from the same songbook. Back in the heady days of 1917, Lenin boasted that when he finished building his workers’ paradise “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay.” A single jail cell was more like it, but who thought that at the time?

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith noted the paradox, or seeming paradox, of capitalism: that the more individuals were left free to follow their own ends, the more their activities were “led by an invisible hand to promote” ends that aided the common good. Private pursuits conduced to public goods: that is the beneficient alchemy of capitalism. In The Road to Serfdom and other works, Friedrich Hayek expanded on Smith’s fundamental insight, pointing out that the spontaneous order created and maintained by competitive market forces leads to greater prosperity than a planned economy.

The sentimentalist cannot wrap his mind, or his heart, around that datum. He (or she) cannot understand why “society” shouldn’t favor “cooperation” (a pleasing-sounding arrangement) over “competition” (much harsher), since in any competition there are losers, which is bad, and winners, which may be even worse.

Socialism is a version of sentimentality. Even so hard-headed an observer as George Orwell was susceptible. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Orwell argued that since the world “potentially at least, is immensely rich,” if we developed it “as it might be developed … we could all live like princes, supposing that we wanted to.” Never mind that part of what it means to be a prince is that others, most others, are not royalty. (Or, as that admirable logician W. S. Gilbert put it: “When every one is somebodee, / Then no one’s anybody!”)

As Hayek observed, the socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have been able to “generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts,” they cannot also consciously “design an even better and more gratifying system.” Central to Hayek’s teaching is the unyielding fact that human ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris. A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

The urgency with which Hayek condemns socialism is a function of the importance of the stakes involved. As he puts it in his last book The Fatal Conceit , the “dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival” because “to follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” We get a foretaste of what Hayek means whenever the forces of socialism triumph. There follows, as the night the day, an increase in poverty and a diminution of individual freedom.

The curious thing is that this fact has had so little effect on the attitudes of intellectuals and the politicians who appeal to them. No merely empirical development, it seems—let it be repeated innumerable times—can spoil the pleasures of socialist sentimentality. This unworldliness is tied to another common trait of intellectuals: their contempt for money and the world of commerce. The socialist intellectual eschews the “profit motive” and recommends increased government control of the economy. He feels, Hayek notes, that “to employ a hundred people is … exploitation but to command the same number [is] honorable.”

Not that intellectuals, as a class, do not like possessing money as much as the rest of us. But they look upon the whole machinery of commerce as something separate from, something indescribably less worthy than, their innermost hearts’ desires. Of course, there is a sense in which this is true. But many intellectuals fail to appreciate two things. First, the extent to which money, as Hayek put it, is “one of the great instruments of freedom ever invented,” opening “an astounding range of choice to the poor man—a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.”

Second, intellectuals tend to ignore the extent to which the organization of commerce affects the organization of our aspirations. As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Servile State, “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.” The really frightening question wholesale economic planning raises is not whether we are free to pursue our most important ends but who determines what those “most important ends” are to be. “Whoever,” Hayek notes, “has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.”

There has been a great deal of agitation over the sub-prime so-called crisis in the last few months. Probably, there is more agitation to follow. More fiscal pain is on the way as banks make further write downs and (nota bene) the market corrects itself. But let’s keep a little perspective on the matter. Yesterday, the market closed at over 13,400. In 1982, the market plunged to about 700—that’s seven hundred—thanks in large part to Jimmy Carter’s brilliant handling—and “handling” is le mot juste—of the economy and America’s political fortunes.

On economic matters, Mrs. Clinton is at heart a socialist of Keynesian disposition. We’ve been there, done that. Do we have to go through it again? There is some irony in the fact the Keynes provided a most penetrating criticism of the top-down rationalism that he himself propounded in economic matters. Writing about Bertrand Russell and his Bloomsbury friends, Keynes tartly observed that

Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously
incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally.

What prodigies of existential legerdemain lay compacted in that phrase “all we had to do”! To my ears, anyway, it is redolent of one of the most nauseating epithets in recent memory: “It takes a village.” We all know that more government intervention and control means high taxes, greater inefficiency, and economic stagnation. We’ve seen it happen dozens of times. We remember the past. Are we still condemned to repeat it?

It will be interesting to see what sorts of “all-we-have-to-do” proposals Hillary and the other aspirants to the job of running your life for you will propose as we muddle our way through this latest financial contretemps. Don’t say she didn’t warn you.

I am glad that our former paper of record is getting some small portion of the obloquy it deserves for “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles,” the front-page story it ran on January 13 inaugurating a series about the supposed violent tendencies of American soldiers who had returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

There were, the Times moaned, “121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.” Oh-my-god, has BushHitler transformed the U.S. Military into a bunch of homicidal maniacs?

Not quite, Virginia (actually, the authors were Deb and Liz: Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez–remember those names and avoid them). As my colleague Bob Owens at Pajamas Media reported a few days ago, the ink was barely dry on tomorrow’s fish-wrapper before Sontag’s and Alvarez’s patchwork of innuendo, statistical “creativity,” and ideological twisting of facts came to light. In the first place, the “121″ homicides that the Times cites would actually represents a far lower murder rate than among the general civilian population. Sontag and Alvarez never get around to mentioning that little tidbit.

Even worse, however, is the link that Sontag and Alvarez imply, but by no means demonstrate, between military service and homicidal behavior. As Owens notes,

Of those 121 summaries, 40 do not show direct ties between the stresses of deploying to combat zones and the homicides for which these veterans were charged, and of those, 14 were of highly dubious nature.

• The appropriately named Travis D. Beer, an Army reservist deployed to Iraq, pleaded no contest to motor vehicle homicide, and had two prior arrests for driving under the influence. The Times does not note if those prior arrests occurred before he deployed to Iraq.
• Jonathan Braham, a Marine veteran of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, shot a man whom he thought had sexually abused his stepson. According to the Times’ own reporting, he was adamant that his service in Iraq did not play a role in his decision to shoot the alleged abuser.
• Brian Epting was sentenced to six years for vehicular homicide when he lost control of his car while drag racing in 2005 and killed Robert Duffy, a World War II veteran. Is the Times seriously implying that his deployment to Iraq in 2003 is to blame for a drag racing death?
• Michael Gwinn Jr. has a history of domestic violence.
• Robert G. Jackson was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, as was Johnny Williams Jr., which cannot readily be tied to military deployments. Likewise, James Pitts has psychiatric problems predating his deployment to Iraq.
• Michael Antonio Jordan had a juvenile criminal record and was involved in gang activity.
• Christian Mariano was acquitted for acting in self-defense, and yet the Times still included him on this list.
• Jason R. Smith, a National Guard veteran and Atlanta narcotics officer, shot elderly Kathryn Johnston in an infamous no-knock raid, and is currently being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, but his attorney cannot say what the proximate cause of his PTSD may have been.
• Aaron Stanley’s sideline occupation as an alleged methamphetamine and marijuana dealer may have had more to do with his homicides than his deployment to Iraq. Vernon Walker killed two fellow soldiers while dealing drugs.
• Larry Jaimall West was a member of the Crips street gang.
• Jared Terrasas had a conviction for misdemeanor spousal abuse prior to his deployment to Iraq
• Jessie L. Ullom had already been charged with abusing his infant son before he saw combat.

Owens also provides this helpful historical reminder:

[T]he bizarre emphasis of the New York Times upon veteran violence without the provision of context can be understood by remembering that Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times, once said during the Vietnam War that if a North Vietnamese soldier ran into an American soldier, he’d rather see the American soldier shot.

What if someone were to apply the sort of statistical reasoning to the Times that the Times applies to the men and women that make life cosy in and around the newsrooms of our former paper of record? As it happens, someone has. In an inspired piece of investigative journalism, the weblog Iowahawk reveals the seamy truth in a sensation, Pulitzer-Prize-winning bid called “Bylines of Brutality” (”As Casualties Mount, Some Question The Emotional Stability of Media Vets”). The sad, sad story begins:

A Denver newspaper columnist is arrested for stalking a story subject. In Cincinnati, a television reporter is arrested on charges of child molestation. A North Carolina newspaper reporter is arrested for harassing a local woman. A drunken Chicago Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member is arrested for wife beating. A Baltimore newspaper editor is arrested for threatening neighbors with a shotgun. In Florida, one TV reporter is arrested for DUI, while another is charged with carrying a gun into a high school. A Philadelphia news anchorwoman goes on a violent drunken rampage, assaulting a police officer. In England, a newspaper columnist is arrested for killing her elderly aunt.

Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence of that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters? Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets.

“These people could snap at any minute,” says James Treacher of the Treacher Institute for Journalist Studies. “We need to get them the help and medication they need before it’s too late.”

Statistics of Shame

Accounts of media psychopathy, while widespread, have until now been largely anecdotal. In order to provide a more focused and systematic study of the crisis, Iowahawk researchers set out to identify and tabulate criminal arrests and convictions of current and former journalists. While by no means comprehensive, this 10-minute project yielded a grim picture of a once-proud profession now in the grips of tragic, drunk, violent, child-raping rage.

The stories cited in the opening paragraph, while instructive, are by no means isolated. Google searches return hundreds of crimes attributable to workers in America’s media industry, and millions of pages containing the terms “journalist” and “murder.” They are as shocking in their detail as they are in their number.

While some journalists’ alleged offenses are limited to propery crimes and theft — such as Redwood City (CA) radio reporter Joe McConnell and Former Detroit TV Reporter Suzanne Wangler — often they take a darker turn, resulting in public endangerment. Current and former journalists seem particularly enthusiastic about driving the nation’s highways and streets in drug and alcohol fueled stupors. Among the journalists arrested or charged with DUI offenses since 2000 include Salon and Guardian columnist Sidney Blumenthal, Chicago TV news anchor Walter Jacobson, Kansas City TV reporter Steve Shaw, Nashville newspaper columnist Brad Schmitt, Albuquerque Journal reporter Chris Vogel, Rocky Mountain News editor Holger Jesen, New York Post Columnist Richard Johnson, Idaho State Journal columnist Brady Slater, Tampa Tribune editor Janet Weaver, St. Petersburg Times reporter Eric Robert Gershman, and Lexington (KY) TV reporter Angelica St. John.

How many unsuspecting American motorists and pedestrians remain at risk from alcoholic media professionals is still a matter of scientific conjecture, but one thing is certain: journalists can be even more deadly outside their cars. Often the journalistic gateway to violent behavior begins with stalking and trespassing — such as has been alleged of People magazine reporters Jeffrey Neal Weiss, and, in an unrelated incident, Don Sider. But sometimes, as in the case of MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, serial stalking behavior goes unpunished and the perpetrators go on to seek more serious thrill-crimes. Journalists recently charged with violent offenses include New York Times reporter and alleged batterer Michael Katz, British reporter Ben Stubbings, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Margaret Gillerman, charged with striking a police officer.

It is an inspired . . . I was going to say “parody,” but really it is far too close to the original to be called a parody. Perhaps it would be more accurate to compare it to the play Hamlet stages to “catch the conscience of the King,” a dramatic re-enactment of the very crime Claudius had committed but had yet to acknowledge. It worked for Hamlet; will Iowahawk’s performance work for the rest of us? It is too early to tell. But read the whole thing here. It is more truthful, and far more amusing, than anything you’ll read in the Times.

Update: And here are some posters relating to The Media Violence Project!.

Over at City Journal, I expatiate briefly on some really silly writing about architecture, touching lightly on a bit of good stuff to offset the silliness.

Why I think architecture matters, and how it differs from the others arts:

The health of art and culture can never be a matter of indifference to society. But in the case of architecture, deformation is especially troubling, because architecture is never a private pursuit, as poetry or painting, for example, can be. It is by its very nature an enterprise that impinges upon the public square. Architecture is an art that, by shaping our physical environment, shapes the temperament of our social interaction and domestic tranquility.

The whole thing is here.

Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds reports that Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is #1 at Amazon.com, that (rumor has it) it will make its debut of the bestseller list of our former paper of record (the one published in New York that says it prints “all the news that’s fit to print”), but that it has been strangely difficult to find in Barnes & Noble. A liberal conspiracy? Who knows. I remember the concerted campaign that was waged against Michael Fumento’s book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS when it appeared some years ago. And I remember when certain books of mine (this one, for example, not to mention this one or this one), though favorably reviewed and humming along in double digits at Amazon seemed irritatingly hard to come by at Barnes & Noble and Borders. I just conducted a casual and unscientific survey of some Barnes & Noble stores near me:

* Norwalk, CT:

Me: “I wonder if you can tell me if you have a book called Liberal Fascism in stock.”
Bookseller: “Liberal what?”
Me: “Fascism. F-a-s-c-i-s-m.”
Bookseller: “Umm, who’s the author?”
Me: “Jonah Goldberg.”
Bookseller: “Let’s see . . . no. But we might be able to order it for you.”

* Stamford, CT:

Same drill.

* Orange, CT:

Same drill.

* Westport, CT:

Similar drill; bookseller thought they had it, but no . . . no: I learn that Milford, CT might have one copy.

I do not propose to draw any conclusions from this. I merely report. You decide.

“Some ideas which you could not actually make good should be sown in the mind with the help of rhetorical figure. The hidden dart sometimes sticks; it cannot be removed, because it cannot be seen; but if you were to say the same thing openly, the defense can justify it and it needs to be proved.”
–Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian would be proud of the Clinton campaign. He took 10 long books to set out “the education of the orator,” and here they are putting it all into action flawlessly, just through intuition or natural aptitude. Hillary and her minions are masters of insinuation, what the sophists (that’s Greek for “politician”) called apophasis or paralipsis, i.e., asserting something by feigning to ignore it. First we have Bill Shaheen, until last week co-chairman of the Clinton campaign. As a story in MSNBC noted, Shaheen was forced to resign after observing to a reporter that Republicans would likely use Obama’s admitted drug use against him in the campaign. “Was Shaheen’s commentary truly a blunder?” the writer asked. Well, what do you think? The Clinton position seems to be (I paraphrase):

We are not going to make Obama’s drug use an issue–no, no matter what the nasty Republicans say, we are not even going to mention the fact that, at least when young, Obama took drugs. It just isn’t fair to make such youthful indiscretions as taking illegal drugs–cocaine or whatever it was–an issue, so we definitely are not going to raise the matter of Obama’s drug use, even though he admitted taking drugs in his autobiography.

Or, as Mark Penn, a Clinton pollster, put it when asked about the Shaheen incident on Hardball: “Well, I think we’ve made clear that the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising.” And Brutus, as Mark Antony continually assured us, “is an honorable man.”

What do you suppose the Greek word for “sleaze” is?

When I peruse the comments to my posts on Pajamas Media, I am alternately amused, entertained, and enlightened. Some of PJM’s interlocutors have corrected errors I’d made, some have also brought illuminating information or frutiful alternative perspectives to bear on the issue at hand. For all those comments, I offer my thanks.

I harbor a different sort of gratitude for another kind of comment: the work of the intemperate crank. Some of those, too, are, in their way, illuminating, and few fail to provide at least some value as entertainment. Consider, to take just one example, this little bijou from “Drew,” commenting on my report that a delegation of Columbia professors was traveling to Tehran to “apologize” to President Ahmadinejad for the rude treatment he suffered at the hands of Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University. Quoth “Drew”:

boo hoo you bunch of fricking crybabies! So there’s some fringe whackos in Universities. They are going to Iran to apologize to a repressive regime. Most liberals know they are idiots as do most Americans.Let them make fools of themselves. But no! You babies have to resort to violent fantasies about eliminating all liberals because they don’t think like you do. Isn’t there some stupid book out calling Liberals fascists? Well, pot, kettle, black morons! Have you pajama wearing sacks of crap ever been on a college campus? Jeesh!

Excellent stuff, eh? I think–no, I am quite certain that it was the phrase “you pajama wearing sacks of crap” that endows this comment with its distinctive charm. What a combination of delicacy and rhetorical finesse! Leave to one side the distracting fact that my animadversion contains no fantasy about eliminating any, let alone all, liberals (though the commentator who suggested that the US government think twice about letting those professors back in the country had a proposal worth considering). Pointing that out would be to detract from the primal roar Drew was clearly pleased to emit. Cicero himself, dilating on the depredations of Catiline, was hardly more eloquent. It’s a pleasure to see public controversy and invective pursued at such an exalted level of mannerly articulation.

My friend Andrew McCarthy has an important and admonitory article over at National Review on the McCain/Feingold so-called “campaign finance reform” act. Actually, it should be called the “McCain/Feingold anti-political speech act.” John McCain, supposed conservative from Arizona, and Russ Feingold, ostentatious liberal from Wisconsin, may seem like an odd couple. But both have a passion to undermine the First Amendment by curtailing free speech in the political arena. Andrew explains:

McCain believes political speech is bad for democracy - as long, of course, as there is an exemption for mainstream media speech that swoons over “mavericks” who break with conservatives over immigration, global warming, the Bush tax cuts, etc. The Senator, however, is astute enough to know his assault on the First Amendment is wildly unpopular with the people whose nomination he seeks. So, to put their minds at ease, he told National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru last year that he was satisfied by President Bush’s 2002 decision to sign McCain/Feingold into law. He would, he assured, seek no further “legislation” to ban political speech.

Turns out the captain of the “Straight-Talk Express” left out one itsy-bitsy detail. Even as he spoke those words, he was - as an influential senator - exhorting the United States Supreme Court to tack a sweeping judicial ban onto the already extensive McCain/Feingold restrictions.

The target was Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL). This pro-life group well understood that when it comes to abortion, the action is in the federal courts. In 2004, the president was working to put his pro-life stamp on those courts by appointing conservative judges. He was being blocked by Democrats, who, though in the minority, were capitalizing on the chamber’s procedural rules to filibuster nominees for the all-important federal appellate courts. One of those Democrats was none other than Sen. Feingold. So WRTL decided to run issue ads, urging Feingold to do his constitutional duty and give the Bush nominees an up-or-down vote.

Feingold, however, was up for reelection. In the Alice in Wonderland world of McCain/Feingold, that meant it was ostensibly against the law for an interest group in our democracy to utter his name in “electioneering statements” on a matter of vital public policy 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election - that is, in the 90 days when public attention is at its height and political speech matters most. As the First Amendment ensures that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” WRTL had this crazy notion that McCain/Feingold violated its fundamental rights.

Obviously, McCain is all for “straight talk” as long as it is he - or the New York Times - doing the talking

We have all become inured to assaults on free speech from the Left. After all, that’s a large part of what political correctness is all about: free speech for me, but not for thee. It’s so blatant that the phrase “political correctness” is often accompanied by a smile–it’s an an uneasy smile, to be sure, but it is a smile nonetheless. “Politically correct” describes some exaggerated bit of left-wing moralism–so exaggerated that it is hard to take seriously. We smile when we read about an elite American college that has enrolled the sin of “lookism“–that is, the unacceptable belief that some people are more attractive than others–into its catalogue of punishable offenses. We laugh when hearing that a British academic has condemned Frosty the Snowman as a white “male icon” that helps “to substantiate an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system,” whatever that is. We scoff when we hear about the University of Michigan professor who complains that J. K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter books “conventionally repeat much of the same sexist and white patriarchal biases of classical fairy tales.” We smile, we laugh, we scoff. But most of us do so uneasily.

Why the uneasiness? There are several reasons. In the first place we know that such strictures, though preposterous, are not without consequence. Indeed, the phenomenon of political correctness is a great teacher of the often overlooked lesson that the preposterous and the malign can cohabit happily. Just because something is preposterous does not mean it is not dangerous.

There is also the fact that the odor of malignity, of thuggishness, is never far from the lairs of political correctness. The student accused of lookism can be severely penalized for the offense, as can the student accused of racism, “homophobia,” or “mis-directed laughter.” In some cases, the academic thought police even attempt to regulate what is not said, as when an editor of a student newspaper was removed from his post because he had given “insufficient coverage” to minority events. We laugh when we read about poor Frosty, but the laughter dies when we consider that the professor who would have us melt Frosty is also someone responsible for the education of students. It is amusingly ludicrous to burden Mrs. Rowling’s entertainments with feminist rhetoric, but then we remember that books can be banned or slighted for less.

It is worth bearing this in mind as we contemplate the implications of the McCain-Feingold act. As I say, we’re used to such things on college campuses and, increasingly, in the workplace. But it is dispiriting, to say the least, to see such an assault on free speech in its most originary form–argument and the expression of opinion about basic political controversies and candidates–under attack by a man who advertises himself as a conservative and champion of individual liberty.

The announcement yesterday that Philippe de Montebello, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1977, planned to retire at the end of 2008 presages not only the end of an era but also a dangerous crossroads for that distinguished institution.

Perhaps more than any other director of a major collection, Mr. de Montebello has steadily upheld high artistic standards in the face of an ever more agressive onslaught of the trendy and the meretricious. In an age when museums have more and more become politically correct purveyors of one or another form of aesthetic pathology, Mr. de Montebello has courageously resisted the blandishments of the socially enfranchised pseudo-avant garde that, for decades, has populated the established art world with one repellent fad after the next. Not only did Mr. de Montebello keep the Met on the high road of artistic excellence, he also spoke out effectively at critical moments when the tsunami of artistic garbage threatened to overwhelm us.

I think, for example, of his 1999 op-ed in our former paper of record about “Sensation,” the pathetic congeries of ready-made outrage that became a momentary cause célèbre among the art ladies of both sexes when Rudy Guiliani denounced it as “outrageous,” and full of “sick stuff,” and threatened to stop city funding of the Brooklyn Museum where this carefully calculated exercise in naughtiness occurred. (Remember: pictures of the Virgin Mary festooned with cutouts from pornographic magazines and some clumps of elephant dung, pubescent female mannequins studded with erect penises, vaginas, and anuses, fused together in various postures of sexual coupling, etc. etc.) Mr. de Montebello had some appropriately tart things to say about the objects on view in “Sensation,” but, as he noted, the really disturbing thing about the exhibition was that people were “so cowed by the art establishment or so frightened at being labeled philistines that they dare not speak out and express their dislike for works that they find either repulsive or unaesthetic or both.”

Exactly right. But it almost goes without saying that Mr. de Montebello was pilloried by the art establishment for throwing his lot in with the philistines and daring to criticize “Sensation.” What other major director would have had the wit and the pluck to exhibit such independence of mind? I can think of none.

What does the future hold for the Met? It is difficult to be sanguine. Naturally, a “search committee” has been organized, but what plausible candidates are there? One person rumored to be on the short list is Gary Tinterow, a long-time curator at the Met, and a talented one, too. But in recent years Mr. Tinterow has gone out of his way to demonstrate how tractable he is, how willing to compromise aesthetic excellence for the sake of appealing to whatever trashy “genius” the art market happens to favor this season. As James Panero, my colleague at The New Criterion, pointed out, Tinterow’s acquisition, on long-term loan, of one of Damien Hirst’s dead-fish-in-a-tank-formaldehyde pranks does not bode well for the Met should Tinterow step into the director’s shoes.

All in all, alas, the prospects that have been whispered about so far are pretty discouraging. How disquieting it must be for Mr. de Montebello, who has spent more than thirty years holding the line and upholding high standards. Like Louis XIV, he has reason to mutter “apres moi, le déluge.”

Update: As a kind reader, and many friends (who knew there were so many?) have pointed out, it was the next Louis numero XV, who made the famous prediction. I regret the error, especially since I repeated it in a piece for The New York Post, thus giving the nice people at The Village Voice a reason to gloat. Oh well, as Horace says, “bonus Homerus dormitat”: even Homer nods.